Adam Arenson is a historian of nineteenth-century North America, investigating the cultural and political history of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction and tracing the development of American cities. His work focuses on the American West and its borderlands – from California to the Yukon Territory, from St. Louis to El Paso – and places the experience of European settlement in the region into comparative perspective. Arenson's work on American cities reconstructs how residents made sense of their surroundings by supplementing the written record with material-culture findings and geographic information system (GIS) analysis. See further information on current research projects and classes taught at http://faculty.utep.edu/aiarenson
Articles
The Double Life of St. Louis: Narratives of Origins and Maturity in Wade’s Urban Frontier, Indiana Magazine of History (2009)
A half-century after Richard C. Wade's landmark history <em>The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western...
Freeing Dred Scott: St. Louis Confronts an Icon of Slavery, 1857-2007, Common-place (2008)
On March 6, 1857, in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the...
A Cultural Barometer: The St. Louis Mercantile Library as National Institution, 1846-1871, Missouri Historical Review (2008)
The St. Louis Mercantile Library, from its founding in 1846 to its 25th anniversary in...
Anglo-Saxonism in the Yukon: The _Klondike Nugget_ and American-British Relations in the ‘Two Wests,’ 1898-1901, Pacific Historical Review (2007)
During the Klondike Gold Rush, Americans and Britons connected their joint local experiences with the...
Ansel Adams’s Eucalyptus Tree, Fort Ross: Nature, Photography, and the Search for California, California History (2005)
This article considers the image of California evoked in the unusual Ansel Adams photograph Eucalyptus...
Books
The Cultural Civil War: St. Louis and the Failures of Manifest Destiny (2010)
In the mid-nineteenth century, the conflict to define the promises of Manifest Destiny and the...
Contributions to Books
Libraries in Public before the Age of Public Libraries: Interpreting the Furnishings and Design of Athenaeums and Other ‘Social Libraries,’ 1800-1860, The Library as Place: History, Community and Culture (2007)
Before public libraries became common in the United States, both elite and striving men sought...
Newspaper and Magazine Articles and Blogs
Saving the Bank’s Artistic Assets, Edge of the American West (2009)
Save some memorable banks! For three decades, Millard Sheets and his studio artists created mosaics,...
Blog Posts and Interviews, Making History Podcast (2008)
Ongoing contributions on the resources and methods of writng engaging history. See posts and podcast...
Celebrate their freedom, not the ugly case bearing their name, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (2007)
One hundred fifty years ago, Chief Justice Roger Taney announced the U.S. Supreme Court's decision...
The Power of Oklahoma City, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (2006)
I can’t remember what I was doing at 9:02 a.m. Central Time, on April 19th,...
Unpublished Papers
Dred Scott vs. the Dred Scott Case: History and Memory of a Signal Moment in American Slavery, 1857-2007 (2009)
The Dred Scott Case centered on the Scott family—Dred and Harriet, and their daughters Eliza...
Book Reviews
Review of Empire’s Edge: American Society in Nome, Alaska 1898-1934 by Preston Jones (2008)
A review of <em>Empire’s Edge: American Society in Nome, Alaska 1898-1934</em>, an extremely valuable portrait...